sixthiterationlogs | one little snap and it all falls, falls, falls down

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one little snap and it all falls, falls, falls down

WHO: Cougar Alvarez
WHERE: Bungalow #22
WHEN: 1AM, July 25
OPEN TO: Jake Jensen, Veronica Sawyer
WARNINGS: Violence, mentions of death
STATUS: Closed

It's a miracle Cougar's lasted this long.

He's been sleeping like the dead, when he does sleep. There have been long days of insomnia that keep him awake and then when he does find sleep, it's without dreams. It's a blessing from God in a place that seems scant on blessings. It's taken this long for him to find respite in sleep and when he does, it's thanks to Jensen's presence and the knowledge that someone else has his back.

It starts like it always does. Cougar thrashes in the bed, tossing and turning as he dreams. As always, it's green. The smell of the jungle is around them and he hears birds. The laughter of children echoes in his ears, rapid-fire, happy Spanish being shared and plans for the future. He hears them from all around him, as if in stereo, but just like always, the dream shifts.

The fires start, claiming the trees around them, and then the bullets. One by one, the children fall, consumed by bullets and fire, but they don't stay dead. They come back to haunt him, aglow and afire with hatred and anger in their eyes.

"You," they chorus, staring at him, "it's your fault."

He can never move, in this dream. Stuck, paralyzed, Cougar can't get away as they crumble to dust, one by one. His little angelitos are slowly dying because he put them on a helicopter and told them everything was going to be fine. He lied to them and now they're dead, twenty-five little angels on his soul.

"No," he murmurs. "No, no, no!" It builds faster and faster, until Cougar is thrashing in his bed, the covers tangled with his body as he starts to scream, the fires of hell opening their gates for him in the dream, beckoning him in for what he did. Sweaty, panicked, and as scared as ever, he flails in the bed as hoarse bellows fill the bungalow and he tries for the knife to defend himself against this waking nightmare.

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His look shows how he really feels about having his acts compared to a sneeze, because he thinks that there's a world of difference between the two. He doesn't ask her what she thinks about the times when he'd intended to kill -- like his targets, like Wade, like Roque if he's true in his heart. He doesn't think that's going to go over well, not at all.

"You should stay out of my room if I'm screaming," he says hoarsely. "Then no one will get hurt." As if Jake won't come hurtling and get a black eye anyway, but he can at least try to limit the damage.

Veronica's worried expression goes a bit more pinched, her chest suddenly tight under what feels like a chastisement. She'd only been trying to help, but apparently that's unwanted. She wants to ask if he'd just let her scream in her sleep, but knows he'll say it isn't the same. Maybe he's right, maybe her brush with death is nothing compared to his demons.

She slowly nods and slides from the bed, trying to mask her disappointment and doing a poor job of it.

"You should talk to someone," she says as she takes a step toward the door and pauses. "It's supposed to help."

Cougar leans forward as he works to catch his breath and shake the rest of the nightmare. "Wait," he says, dredging up the single word from under the pile of his will to not do this. He knows there isn't anyone else around that can listen to him and Jake gets irritated when Cougar takes on this guilt.

And a stranger is out of the question.

"If you mean that, I will talk to you," he says firmly.

His voice brings Veronica up short, and she hovers a moment, watching him with uncertain, expressive eyes before slowly nodding. No, she hasn't known him all that long, but it's been long enough to understand what a wrench it must be to take that first step.

"Yeah, I meant it. I mean, I should probably be talking to someone, too. My own dreams aren't exactly peachy."

In truth, the person Cougar should be speaking to is a priest. Even in Bolivia, he'd had one to offer confession to and had been given plenty of penance to fill. He's lost track of the rosaries he's said, but he knows they must number in the hundreds from that short stint alone.

He nods his head, his hooded eyes heavy with exhaustion from lack of sleep, but he thinks it will be good to talk to someone -- even if he doubts it will change his mind on his guilty role in some of what he's done. "What do you dream of?"

Veronica settles with her back against the door frame. It's easier to talk about these things, she thinks, with a buffer of distance between them, like she might more easily forget that she'd been sobbing in Cougar's arms just a moment ago. She feels calmer and a little less raw over here.

"A lot of things all mashed together," she admits, and looks to her toes, bare against the cool slats of the hardwood floor. "My boyfriend, he... well, in a nutshell, he tricked me into helping him kill people. Twice. One was my best friend. So I see her a lot, but I also see him, too. It usually just starts kind of weird, but by the end he's got his hands around my throat."

It's one thing for him to kill people in the army. He has a mission and a purpose. Some boyfriend who convinced Veronica to kill through tricks is a piece of shit who deserves to burn in the hell that Cougar so fears. He curses, heavily, under his breath and pats the bed beside him, offering some space. It's not that he wants to offer hugging or even a shoulder touch, but this isn't the sort of thing you should have to say at such a distance across the room.

"In the dream," he says, "do you ever kill him?"

"No," Veronica replies as she eyes the space on the bed where Cougar's just had his hand, wondering whether her answer is one he'll consider correct or not. They've argued about things like this before, about her being too naive for her own good. She's pretty fucking firm on the idea that not being willing to kill people doesn't make her naive.

After a moment of reluctance, she walks back to the bed and sits down. "We're supposed to be talking about you, too," she points out, eyebrows arched knowingly.

His shoulders tighten a little and his gaze slides to the door. Depending on what he tells her, some of this is a story that belongs not only to him, but to Jake as well. Telling Veronica means giving up some of their past, but she needs to understand why it's not safe to come at him, at night. "We had a mission in Bolivia to paint a drug lord's mansion and blow it. We had locked in the targets when I saw all the niños pequeños."

"When we called it in, a man named Max jammed us, refused to let us stop it from happening. Twenty-five children, all there. We couldn't let that happen and so we rescued them, barely escaping ourselves. The helicopter couldn't fit us and them." Cougar inhales sharply and realizes how much he's said. It makes his throat ache with grief and he's not sure how much more he can say.

"Why don't you kill him in the dream? Is it because you don't want to? Because you love him or you don't want to kill?"

Listening to him, to the emotion underpinning the words, it's difficult to not be pulled in, to feel her own chest tightening at the inevitability of Cougar's story. The children died, she knows that. He had to watch them die, and Jake did, too, she's guessing. The shift back to talk of J.D. is like ice water thrown in her face.

She stares at Cougar a long moment, stunned.

Our love is God.

A breath stutters out of her and she shakes her head, tears brimming her eyes again. "I don't know. Maybe because I already had to watch him die once. Or maybe because I manage to wake up before I get that far." She swallows hard. "I shot him before he did it, before he killed himself. But it wasn't enough."

"Would you kill him, if he was here and you could," Cougar thinks this is important. If she's not killing him in the dream, is it because she doesn't want to deep down or is it because she doesn't know how to. Sometimes it's not about the functional knowledge, but not knowing how to live with the taking of a life of someone. "Would you go back and do it again? Shoot him better?" Shoot him so that she was the one who ended things, he means, because then at least there is the sense of completion.

He takes a deep breath to give himself the strength to keep talking. "The twenty-five children, I carried them onto the helicopter and put them there myself. I told them to hold on tight for the ride. I promised it would be okay," he says roughly, his heart sinking. "They shot it down, the whole thing up in flames and there was nothing left but teeth and pieces." Twenty-five children and he's the one who put them on the helicopter. He's one of the ones who should have been dead, instead. "Max and the CIA killed them. I will kill Max," he vows.

That, at least, Veronica can understand, and she envies Cougar his simple revenge a little. Her story is not nearly so clean-cut. He's looking for black and white answers when her life has always been shades of gray.

"I don't know if I'd kill him if he showed up here," she admits with a weak shrug. "From the day I found Thorfinn coming out of that idiot fountain, I've been asking myself some variation of that question. And I just don't know. I don't know what I'd do if he showed up here. I don't think..." She stops herself, shakes her head to clear it. She'd been about to say that she didn't think J.D. was truly a bad person, but—

She sighs, her shoulders slumping. "I don't think I could be the person to give him redemption, but I don't know if I could kill him, either. I don't know if I could bring myself to do it. I guess that makes me weak."

"What if you let me do it," he says, because right now, he has innocent blood on his hands, but he also has a kill count of over a hundred people before a helicopter took down children that added to it against Cougar's will. He gives her an expectant look, thinking that it would solve her problems. After all, he would get to protect her and she wouldn't have to deal with him.

"I could make it fast. Or slow," he offers.

And he doesn't even think he would have nightmares, not after hearing about what he had put Veronica through. The trouble with all of this is that Cougar's being hypocritical. After all, if Roque came up through the fountain, he doesn't know what he would do.

"No," Veronica immediately replies, abruptly wide-eyed with alarm. "No. Not unless he was trying to hurt someone. No." She feels like she can't repeat it enough to make herself clear, not when Cougar had offered so casually.

She realizes as she says it that J.D. might not find a reason to kill anyone here, if his bullshit manifesto was to be believed. This place is difficult, but there's definitely not any classism or pointless marginalization. At least, not among those of them trapped.

Then again, she has to wonder whether he'd find a reason, whether he'd gotten a taste for it...

She pulls in a sharp breath, squeezing her eyes shut for a moment. This is the last thing she wants to be thinking about right now.

"It probably doesn't even matter," she says, frowning as she opens her eyes again.

Cougar doesn't say that given all the madness that's been around them, more people arriving could happen. Especially if that someone happens to screw with their minds. He knows and anticipates that Max or Roque are going to come out of that fountain one day and Cougar is going to get Jake and they are going to end it, immediately.

"It matters to you," he points out, voice slightly rough. "Which means it matters. I will respect what you want to do, though," he vows. "And I will do whatever you say. Unless he hurts you," he warns. "Then there is no choice."

For a long moment, Veronica says nothing, and then slowly nods. "Yeah," she agrees. "Okay."

She isn't delusional; she knows that things might have gone very differently had she actually had some kind of support system when things has gone sour between herself and J.D. And sure, she may be naive for thinking that here, in this egalitarian prison, he probably wouldn't find such an easy justification for killing her. But she's not an idiot, either, and a back-up plan isn't a bad idea when you're dealing with the mentally unstable.

He hasn't told her everything. The guilt is there, gnawing mildly on his ankles like a reminder that he's promised to talk to her, but he also has to wonder if twenty-five children's souls isn't enough for one night. And yet, his night terrors had only grown worse from Bolivia. They existed long before that. He's not sure if this is the time to talk about that, but he feels like he should give her something else for being so honest. "Nightmares, they were from before Bolivia," he offers roughly. "And they are worse because of LA." He breathes in deeply, settling his heart to a steady, infrequent thumping against his chest.

"I killed our teammate," he says, without emotion in his voice. "Someone we fought with for years. Our friend."

Veronica's eyebrows pinch together, worry and confusion, and she watches Cougar for a long moment, trying to read the details of what he's said in the movement of his hands, the subtle shifting of his muscles beneath the skin.

She blinks at last and tilts her head. "Why?"

There is no impulse to cast stones, given her own glass house. But this, she thinks, is not so black and white as his previous confession.

Cougar bows his head as if the brim of a hat will protect him from her judgment and her gaze. Without the protection of those things, he's left to instead measure his words and translate them in his head. It would be so much easier to do this in Spanish, but he doesn't think he's capable of that right now. "He betrayed us," he says firmly. "He did things that would have gotten us all killed. Got Pooch shot," he growls.

"So he dies, by my bullet."

His bullet in a motorcycle that took out two birds with one stone, but still, if he hadn't had made that shot, Roque would have been the next.

"So you didn't have a choice," Veronica quietly prompts at length, trying to parse how difficult it must have been despite that and knowing she's falling woefully short. "Not really. It was either the others or him."

It's that tired old logic question writ large and messy: Train barreling down the track, save the baby or save an entire group of adults. Who can really make a decision like that in real life? There's no answer that doesn't leave an indelible mark.

Kill your boyfriend or let the whole school die.

It hadn't been a choice.

He could have injured and not killed, but then Roque would have escaped. And, he can't help it, but there's a part of him that had genuinely enjoyed pulling the trigger to send him to hell for his betrayal. He doesn't let that show on his face, though, because there are some things that people outside their unit don't need to know.

Cougar isn't even sure he's ready to tell Jake that he'd enjoyed it, just a little.

"If he escaped, he would have just run. He wouldn't have been a harm," he clarifies. "But yes, he would have killed my commanding officer to escape." And that, maybe, is the worst of all. Years of friendship gone for money. Cougar had thought he'd known Roque better than that.

"And it still bothers you," Veronica supplies. Probably in ways Cougar himself can't articulate, even in Spanish. She knows that J.D. had to die; he'd crossed a threshold he could never come back from. But still there's that lingering doubt, the knot in her stomach because she'll never completely understand why.

Quietly, she reaches for Cougar's hand and gives it a gentle squeeze.

He offers her a shrug, because he's not sure what part of it bothers him. It's the betrayal, he thinks. It bothers him that he hadn't seen it coming and that it had nearly led to all of them dying, if not for Aisha and her well-timed rocket launcher. Pooch would've bled out, he would've taken a bullet to the head, and Jensen --

No. He's not thinking of that anymore, because it's making his jaw ache from the tightness. He takes her hand and covers it with the other, squeezing lightly. "There is more," he admits. "But I think tonight, that is enough."

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one little snap and it all falls, falls, falls down

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